3. Microsoft is not actually distributing anything under the deal, saying someone else will give you a program does not make you a distributor - if anyone's up the crapper, it's Novell at this point.
It would have been had they not inadvertently licensed their patents via the Novell deal! Incorrect. Microsoft never agreed to the GPL either via electronic or ink signature means. They have licensed nothing, as you can't bind third parties into a contract without their consent (e.g. you can't bind Walmart into the GPL because they sell Dell PCs with Linux on them - the law simply wont tolerate it).
Otherwise, you are saying that it is nice and legal for me to sign a contract saying that I will borrow $6,000 from a finance company and you will repay it (note: without your signature), and expect it to be binding.
Moglen's opinion there would never hold up in court... though I would be interested in seeing how he defends it.
The first would, of course, be patents MS most definitely holds on the ribbon. I tried Access 2007's ribbon once, and it was pretty much just a tabbed toolbar. The bottom panel of Blender 3D modeling software has something very close to a ribbon. Do you have the numbers of these patents so that I can try deconstructing their claims? It's defensive. There's an agreement granting you a non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free license to use it. Once can't just "reverse" them to my knowledge.
1/10th of 1% is, in fact, 0.1%. Apologies. I did in fact misread that. And I can certainly agree that "less than a tenth of a percent" is definitely a bullshit figure.
I don't think I can agree completely that the state shouldn't at least partially fund healthcare and education (actually I lie somewhat on our "free" healthcare - the government will ONLY cover emergency care, and only at hospitals. Show up at a private A&E clinic, foot the bill and they MIGHT pay for it via an SOE (state owned enterprise, not Sony Online Entertainment) which is largely self funding. They never cover visiting a doctor unless you are referred to hospital)
Consider yourself lucky you have three of them (less chance of any given one having all your details, presumably) - we have ONE.
No kidding? That sucks. Where's 'we', incidentally? Is this thing state-run?
Nope. In New Zealand, we have one credit organisation, and it's fully private. Accountable to noone too, since we have NO regulation regarding credit reporting bureaus.
Because, as we all know, it is *SO* incredibly easy to get support for your Microsoft Office products when you need it... or when it crashes... or when it corrupts your files...
In fact, they have a massive worldwide callcenter just waiting to help you and everyone else with your MS Office product. (what was the number again? I seem to have misplaced it.) And loads of internet based communities where users help each other with problems. (I forgot the address, could you write it in a post?).
Yes. The great and famous support for MS Office is the reason not to switch to any other product. I agree. Totally.... or something...
*g* I know you were kidding, but every sarcastic comment you made was exactly true. The massive call centre is called "Premier Support" and all of our government departments actually have that service. One call to Microsoft, quote our agreement number, and we have someone knowledgeable on the line willing and able to help debug the problem. They can't solve it? It's escalated to the team that actually owns the product. They can't solve it either? It's escalated to a Developer. Yes, Microsoft will actually put us on the line with a Windows developer, or a SQL Server developer, or whoever in order to fix the problem. In a real pinch, they will actually fly said developer to our site to analyse the issue.
I'd like to correct this too, as the Minister of Education does NOT control Universities and their students and teachers. These are private institutions who, apart from being funded per-person to subsidise tertiary education for citizens, make money themselves and fund crap on their own.
In addition I believe the state of a country using FOSS has special obligations too support the products they use. Mainly because it is common since to work on the continued development and increased quality of the digital infrastructure the country is depending on - but also because a state/country should set higher standards than everybody else. No, it has an obligation to do what it is chartered to do. The Ministry of Education is chartered to fund and support education. Paying OOo or NeoOffice's bills doesn't do this.
Not only is he an important employee of the state (which I personally believe has a special obligation to contribute to the community when using FOSS because the state should have a very big interest in keeping and support it). He is also the highest authority when it comes to the activities going on at schools and universities. The cornerstone of FOSS development and the foundation of the FOSS community is the educational system - especially the computer science faculties. For that important reason, he should do more than just "leech". I stand by that definition/word in this particular case.
I agree with you that ordinary people should not be obligated to contribute... but I already wrote that in the post you replied to...?;-)
Utter crap. Like the person who you are replying to said, and you ignored, our Minister is required to act in the best interests of furthering the education of New Zealand children. Contributing to Open Source does not do this. Helping random communities does not do this. We have severely underfunded schools, and you in your infinite stupidity are saying "screw them, he should be contributing money to open source".
How about, no. Tax money is NOT something to be handed about to Open Source projects just because. Tax money is meant to further our people. Not groups of people all over the world.
You claim that it's his obligation to give some of that money to Open Source. I'm saying that that's a crock of shit, and that it's his obligation to disperse that money to schools that need it.
How much do they save, and is there a way to invest some of this money into further development of NeoOffice? No, because the budget was only written up a few days ago, likely just after this decision
It should be noted that it is up to the individual schools whether they use NeoOffice, OpenOffice, or MS Office or whatever. The Ministry simply cancelled the volume licensing contract and left the schools to fend for themselves. A lot of schools have approached Microsoft directly and obtained MS Office themselves (out of bulk funding budget).
The central funding has likely already been reallocated.
This is actually a great idea. If the school district has high-school age kids, you could have them work on it too, for elective, or computer science credits. We don't have "districts", the whole country has the same funding source. And there's no way NZQA would allow what you suggest, because we don't use a system which could support that (we use NCEA, documented at http://www.nzqa.govt.nz./ And we have no "electives" either.
You take some of the money you saved from not paying Microsoft's extortion payments, and you hire one good (as in expensive) programmer who is articulate and enjoys mentoring. Their mission is to specifically fix problems in NeoOffice that the school district is experiencing. They would do this themselves, as well as fulfill their other mission, which is to work with a small group (small is important) of gifted and motivated students; which they mentor in the craft of programming. It's important that the group be very small, so that one person could manage it, as well as make it productive. As students leave, new students could join the group, a revolving 4 people for example. Another problem, we don't have districts. Now to add onto that, most schools don't have a high enough decile to be able to secure enough funding to hire a developer. In fact, half of them don't even have a high enough decile to secure IT funding at all - staff are bulk funded;)
If this program were successful, you could create other groups like this. A single professional programmer, with 4 students. You could apply these groups to different parts of Neo Office, or better yet, different applications. I see no downside to this whatsoever. The professional programmers are well compensated (if they aren't it won't work at all), and they get to work on open source projects. The students get credit for something they probably already like to do; plus they get real world experience that will place them above other applicants if they seek programming work in the future. The open source community gets patches to it's software. And the school saves money, and increases education. The downside is our sorry excuse for an education system is not structured in a way that could support this at all.
Note that on Vista this is not necessary, as Vista automatically sandboxes any running IE instance with Protected Mode enabled in Internet Options (or for that matter, any app which uses the protected mode API - Microsoft keep asking the Opera team to implement this).
To show you how transparently false this excuse is, here's the logo Google used for Australia's ANZAC Day, the Aussie equivalent of Memorial Day. Need I remind you that ANZAC day stands for Australia and New Zealand Army Corps day, and is not "the Aussie equivalent of Memorial Day" - it is noted in BOTH countries, and is not "Australia's" alone
Wow. WOW. Did you REALLY just say that less that 0.1% of welfare money is wasted? I mean, seriously dude, REALLY? You just said that? Do you have _anything_ to back that up, or is it just your desire to sate your own feelings of guilt with other people's money? Less than a tenth of 100% is less than 10%, so no he didn't say that. He said that less than 10% is wasted, which is quite likely to be true.
Consider yourself lucky you don't have our countrys bizarre welfare system. We have an entire department with crudtons of staff and offices, paying something like $120 a week to people who have no job. And then harassing them mercilessly until they get a job (and if you forget to actually try, they tell you to piss off and stop paying you).
Then again, this is funded by 12.5% sales tax on all purchases, a tiered taxation system at rates ranging from 21%-42% (and you're totally screwed if you have two jobs, that's like an instant 50% tax rate on that!) of your income, ridiculously high (approximately 30% or something I think) tax on petrol, and something like 80% tax on alcohol and cigarettes (I pulled those numbers from my arse, since they aren't disclosed. But it IS high). And to top it all off, that's just the national taxes! Regional governments add even more, charging for water, garbage collection, the privilege of owning land, the public transport (which is also not free to use either, and not even available to half the areas paying for it), and just recently our central government passed law allowing regional governments to levy their OWN taxes on petrol.
Counter to that, we have free, decent public education, free healthcare, the welfare system will pay out superannuation, partially-government funded retirement savings schemes, interest free student loans, and so on.
Technically the software is almost free, because it comes with a month of game-time included. However, I certainly agree that each expansion should be afforded the same (a month of pre-paid time) and should be roughly the same price as a month of game time (although I certainly wouldn't begrudge a small markup to cover the cost of CD mastering, packaging, and shipping). Going with that, the original disc should not cost much more than a month of prepaid time. The exceptions which I do understand completely are "collectors editions" which have extra stuff in them which actually makes them legitimately cost a lot more to make, and and sell for more - because of all the extra stuff in them.
Currently, all RegisterFly domains are (supposed to have been) placed into serverDeleteProhibited status, which means the Central Registry (Verisign) is not able to actually expire them... they remain perpetually locked until they are changed back to pendingRelease, clientTransferProhibited, or some other status. In other words, they can't expire until the mass transfer.
Slashdot Mirror
Because DailyTech didn't list them? Because they might get sued?
And last I checked... DailyTech doesn't talk about Government Oppression or ??AA either...
Or one more you missed:
3. Microsoft is not actually distributing anything under the deal, saying someone else will give you a program does not make you a distributor - if anyone's up the crapper, it's Novell at this point.
Otherwise, you are saying that it is nice and legal for me to sign a contract saying that I will borrow $6,000 from a finance company and you will repay it (note: without your signature), and expect it to be binding.
Moglen's opinion there would never hold up in court... though I would be interested in seeing how he defends it.
You must be the same guy as the one from up above.
Take the stick out of your ass, slashbot.
I don't think I can agree completely that the state shouldn't at least partially fund healthcare and education (actually I lie somewhat on our "free" healthcare - the government will ONLY cover emergency care, and only at hospitals. Show up at a private A&E clinic, foot the bill and they MIGHT pay for it via an SOE (state owned enterprise, not Sony Online Entertainment) which is largely self funding. They never cover visiting a doctor unless you are referred to hospital)
Not yet. We're waiting though. She wont want to remind us that we HAD a military force before she came in ;)
Mmmm. I think the ones that went into Redemption before the issue were actually locked in Redemption, but I'm not too sure about that.
Ah yes, Flamebait. Because everyone knows that one cannot question The Almighty Google. Get over it, Google can do wrong.
The groupthink around here is fucking pathetic.
No kidding? That sucks. Where's 'we', incidentally? Is this thing state-run?
Nope. In New Zealand, we have one credit organisation, and it's fully private. Accountable to noone too, since we have NO regulation regarding credit reporting bureaus.Wait, that's actually your call? I'm staggered, really. I thought everything our schools did needed about 3 months worth of meetings.
Or am I just jaded looking at it from the Health sector?
Answer: Open License Agreement. The software is subscribed, not licensed. Stop paying, stop using.
Yes, moronic licensing pick.
In fact, they have a massive worldwide callcenter just waiting to help you and everyone else with your MS Office product. (what was the number again? I seem to have misplaced it.) And loads of internet based communities where users help each other with problems. (I forgot the address, could you write it in a post?).
Yes. The great and famous support for MS Office is the reason not to switch to any other product. I agree. Totally.
*g* I know you were kidding, but every sarcastic comment you made was exactly true. The massive call centre is called "Premier Support" and all of our government departments actually have that service. One call to Microsoft, quote our agreement number, and we have someone knowledgeable on the line willing and able to help debug the problem. They can't solve it? It's escalated to the team that actually owns the product. They can't solve it either? It's escalated to a Developer. Yes, Microsoft will actually put us on the line with a Windows developer, or a SQL Server developer, or whoever in order to fix the problem. In a real pinch, they will actually fly said developer to our site to analyse the issue.
I agree with you that ordinary people should not be obligated to contribute... but I already wrote that in the post you replied to...?
Utter crap. Like the person who you are replying to said, and you ignored, our Minister is required to act in the best interests of furthering the education of New Zealand children. Contributing to Open Source does not do this. Helping random communities does not do this. We have severely underfunded schools, and you in your infinite stupidity are saying "screw them, he should be contributing money to open source".
How about, no. Tax money is NOT something to be handed about to Open Source projects just because. Tax money is meant to further our people. Not groups of people all over the world.
You claim that it's his obligation to give some of that money to Open Source. I'm saying that that's a crock of shit, and that it's his obligation to disperse that money to schools that need it.
There's a considerable amount of Tertiary Education. Just most of it happens to be crap.
It should be noted that it is up to the individual schools whether they use NeoOffice, OpenOffice, or MS Office or whatever. The Ministry simply cancelled the volume licensing contract and left the schools to fend for themselves. A lot of schools have approached Microsoft directly and obtained MS Office themselves (out of bulk funding budget).
The central funding has likely already been reallocated.
I see no downside to this whatsoever. The professional programmers are well compensated (if they aren't it won't work at all), and they get to work on open source projects. The students get credit for something they probably already like to do; plus they get real world experience that will place them above other applicants if they seek programming work in the future. The open source community gets patches to it's software. And the school saves money, and increases education. The downside is our sorry excuse for an education system is not structured in a way that could support this at all.
No, because I can guarantee that as soon as that contract was terminated, the funding was reallocated. You drastically overestimate our government.
You know they only expose the entire report to YOU right? The GP is right, the credit report to companies is hopelessly undetailed.
Consider yourself lucky you have three of them (less chance of any given one having all your details, presumably) - we have ONE.
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=9654&of
Note that on Vista this is not necessary, as Vista automatically sandboxes any running IE instance with Protected Mode enabled in Internet Options (or for that matter, any app which uses the protected mode API - Microsoft keep asking the Opera team to implement this).
Consider yourself lucky you don't have our countrys bizarre welfare system. We have an entire department with crudtons of staff and offices, paying something like $120 a week to people who have no job. And then harassing them mercilessly until they get a job (and if you forget to actually try, they tell you to piss off and stop paying you).
Then again, this is funded by 12.5% sales tax on all purchases, a tiered taxation system at rates ranging from 21%-42% (and you're totally screwed if you have two jobs, that's like an instant 50% tax rate on that!) of your income, ridiculously high (approximately 30% or something I think) tax on petrol, and something like 80% tax on alcohol and cigarettes (I pulled those numbers from my arse, since they aren't disclosed. But it IS high). And to top it all off, that's just the national taxes! Regional governments add even more, charging for water, garbage collection, the privilege of owning land, the public transport (which is also not free to use either, and not even available to half the areas paying for it), and just recently our central government passed law allowing regional governments to levy their OWN taxes on petrol.
Counter to that, we have free, decent public education, free healthcare, the welfare system will pay out superannuation, partially-government funded retirement savings schemes, interest free student loans, and so on.
Technically the software is almost free, because it comes with a month of game-time included. However, I certainly agree that each expansion should be afforded the same (a month of pre-paid time) and should be roughly the same price as a month of game time (although I certainly wouldn't begrudge a small markup to cover the cost of CD mastering, packaging, and shipping). Going with that, the original disc should not cost much more than a month of prepaid time. The exceptions which I do understand completely are "collectors editions" which have extra stuff in them which actually makes them legitimately cost a lot more to make, and and sell for more - because of all the extra stuff in them.
Currently, all RegisterFly domains are (supposed to have been) placed into serverDeleteProhibited status, which means the Central Registry (Verisign) is not able to actually expire them... they remain perpetually locked until they are changed back to pendingRelease, clientTransferProhibited, or some other status. In other words, they can't expire until the mass transfer.